


Hunted

by orphan_account



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gore, Self-Mutilation, minor(OC)character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-11 04:52:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2054358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunted

**Author's Note:**

> I have spent way too much time playing Outlast...

Prisons are never nice places, being well-kept and ordered is the highest aesthetic presence they can achieve. Garrus 9 was a clean prison, droids swept the halls. There was structure, there was discipline. Not now. 

Maintenance was beyond restoration. Stains grew down the walls, it stank, it was dirty, the floor was sticky. Everything was so, so wrong. Out of control, wrack and ruin. 

And dark, so dark. The lighting flicked in places and failed completely in others. Corridors became endless tunnels of black and danger. 

It was horrific and there, in the carnage, Fortress Maximus floundered and mourned over his biggest mistake yet: It was thinking that _Overlord_ would make a mistake. 

The name was becoming an acid burn in Fortress Maxmus’s mind. It should’ve been enough to scare him into thinking _what if_ this isn’t as transparent as it seems.

The sight of his tomb left ajar, the nails embedding him to the torture slab unplugged from his metal: an irresistible opportunity. 

_Escape_! _Run!_

There was no one in the room, _go, go, go!_

No sooner had he heaved himself off the slab and dragged himself free of the thin walls concealing him from the horrors his prison underwent, Fortress Maximus found himself unintentionally stranded in the Decepticon’s latest pass time: The Hunt. 

He should’ve known. Wheezing, crawling, fluids oozing through vents, malfunctions; this wasn’t good fortune and _he should’ve known!_ He should’ve stayed reluctantly in the torture chamber that had become his bedroom, underneath the ceiling decorated with heads hanging from chains, grotesque carvings cut into their faces and fluid trickling down exposed spinal cords pattering on his face like rain. 

The fall from the slab jarred wounds open. The mess of his newly amputated limb unravelled further behind him the more he moved, he dragged it along, a trail of cables and energon. His lower end failing, arms wobbling. 

Behind him there was a clatter and a shriek. Garrus-9 was always loud now - alive with fire and madness. Fortress Maximus’s fear squeezed his spark, the air turned cold in his throat. 

They were coming. He could see their shadows, a horde of rioters, stretching round the corner, closer and closer, blacker and blacker. 

If he didn’t find somewhere soon they’d been on him, pulling and tearing, it didn’t matter where he went, _just find somewhere, anywhere! Hide!_

Broken fingers sifted through silt and dirt, it collected in open joints, hardened and crumbled. Fortress Maximus scrambled along. Head full of screaming. 

There was a maintenance hatch.

He didn’t know where it went. 

Presently, he didn’t even know what part of the prison he was in. 

A ball of static rolled up his throat and he coughed it out. 

Shaking hands hooked weakly round the handles of the manhole cover and heaved it aside. 

Hot, wet air billowed out. The tunnel below was black, nut fear drove him inside. Stretching his only leg ahead of him onto the rusted iron step. He couldn’t see how far the ladder reached down. All that matter was that it was enough to submerge him until the danger passed. 

That was if he could even fit… 

The mangled treads still clinging to his back stopped him from sinking any lower. Too misshapen to align with the hole.  Max tried a few times to shove his way through, each attempt getting more desperate, gears and springs splintering away as the shadows on the wall grew and grew. 

His foot slipped off the ladder rung and he struggled to find it again. 

He wouldn’t fit, he was getting stuck. 

Jammed in this hole, squeezed and desperate, the Decepticon’s would find him. 

“G-UH!” Feelings of dread rose inside. Terror overcoming all as his hands pulled on his treads. Tearing off the worn rubber stung - not nearly as much as when he dug beneath the mechanism, into the deep wires reaching into his back and began to tug. Sharply. 

He wished urgency was enough to numb him, and that he had the courage to do what had to be done quickly. Short jerks weren’t enough. He wasn’t going to _fit_ with this wretched thing still on his back. 

And then the Decepticon’s appeared. A horde of bloodthirsty, deranged faces. They paused when they saw Fortress Maximus still stuck, hacking at himself, and they smiled. 

…and charged. 

Hollering, whooping, they were going to tear him apart.  

Taking a deep breath he seized a fist full of wires and ripped. 

Static burst across his vision. A hurricane of alarms bombarded his whirling central processor. Fortress Maximus resisted stopping until his hand was free of his back. Coughing, chewing into his buckled gums. Hands full of green and red wires and he could no longer support himself. 

The fall through the manhole sheered the rest of his tread mechanisms clean off on one side. 

The scream of rent metal indistinct from his own. 

Afraid of losing their prize, the Decepticon’s lunged at him. One grabbed at a finial and Fortress Maximus registered his own reaction after he felt warm energon spilling into his mouth. His teeth sunk into the Decepticon’s wrist. Energon pumped out and poured down his chin, into his throat - everywhere. 

The Decepticon released him with a howl and Fortress Maximus fell through the hole too fast to control himself. The rest of his treads finally ripping off - left on the upper level for the snarling Decepticons to fight over. 

The rusted sides of the ladder burned through his hands, stripping off paint. The ladder ended before he had time to react. The passage he landed in was still dark and steep. Fortress Maximus continued to slide unstoppably through a funnel filled with sludge he couldn’t see, but it smelled putrid and tasted even worse. 

The trip on the water speedway ended in a crash, his weight too much for the piping to contain and so he was ejected into a new room via the ceiling. 

Maroon sludge was dumped into the room with him, splattering across his back until the breach above was automatically sealed. 

Fortress Maximus rested. Breathing hard. The pain of his removed treads blooming between his shoulders but he couldn’t bare to touch it. And all this brown slurry slathered across the open lesion was a breeding ground for something nasty. 

_They’ll be coming for you._

_Get up!_

_Move, Fortress Maximus!_

He couldn’t. 

Vapour rose off him in wisps of steam. Curling and hissing. Vents hacking out something thick and heavy…and black. 

Maximus moaned into the floor, hands slowly curling over his buckled shoulder. 

“Pssst! _Pssst!”_

The sound could’ve been anything - his own body giving up, the poor maintenance of the piping. But Max still looked. As hopeless as it was, he uncurled and stared ahead, for the first time taking in a vague understanding of where he was. 

One of the medical bays. There was some grimy apparatus stacked up in a sink, utensils littered across the floor, equipment that Max didn’t understand and under one of many berths pushed up to the wall Fortress Maximus saw a frail shadow. 

Two yellow eyes glowed out of the darkness under the berth and stared at him. Fortress Maximus adjusted his optics, the colours of the hiding mech became more distinct along with his insignia. Fortress Maximus spark quaked. Another Decepticon. 

One of his own prisoners. 

The tension sat like an anvil upon Max’s back - weighing him to the floor. But through the murk of his apprehension Fortress Maximus started to noticed the Decepticon pointing at the berth standing next to Fortress Maximus. It was fortunately tall enough for him to wiggle under without mutilating himself further. 

More shouts and another clatter came rumbling down the corridor outside. Fortress Maximus hurried and finished concealing himself under the berth. 

His hands sunk into something wet. It clung to Max’s fingers as he lifted them, like tendrils of a monster. The murk spread further, under his chest and belly. It was disgusting and sticky but one revulsion was interrupted by another. Beside him something creaked. Max flinched and was confronted by the next horror of this freak show. An arm dangling off the berth above. Oil and fluid trickling down and falling, 

_Drip,_

_Drip,_

_Drip._

The Decepticon across the room saw Max’s horror and pressed a trembling finger to to his chipped mouth. 

_Shhh._

_“_ What’s in ‘ere?!” A voice outside shouted, it was gruff and the door was booted open shortly after.

A wash of constant light pushed ahead of the Decepticon hunting party, making their shadows long. 

Fortress Maximus worried the rattle of his vents would give him away. His throat began to tickle as he held all of his fear inside. 

“Check the circuit slabs.” 

Across the floor the prisoner’s yellow eyes widened. Fortress Maximus saw him shift. 

Berths were being overturned steadily, slowly progressing down the line toward their hiding places.

“Come out, come out where ever you are…” Someone leered. The terrified prison mech cringed, startling sharply when someone kicked a berth aside, it scraped across the floor and butted into the prisoner. 

He skittered to one side, round eyes flashed toward Maximus, mouth worrying and legs shifting. 

_No, no, stay! Don’t run._ Fortress Maximus couldn’t _do_ anything, he tried to wave the mech down, 

“I’m gettin’ warmer… I’m gunna get cha.” 

It was too much, the prisoner too unsettled. 

_Ignore them, stay, hide, don’t move!_

Too late. 

The mech shook his head at Maximus. As if he’d have more chance running then stranded here. 

Fortress Maximus watched. 

The mech pulled himself out from under the berth. Keeping close to the ground for as long as he could before bursting into a daring sprint. 

There was one round of cannon fire. 

Maximus sucked in a gasp. 

The mech stopped in front of his berth. Only visible up to his knees and they wobbled.  

Then fell. 

The smoke rising from the hole seared through the prisoner’s chest carried with it a smell of burning that Fortress Maximus gagged on. 

His hand clamped over his mouth, holding back every whine and whimper as he was forced to watch the light fade from the mech’s face. 

There was a chorus in the background, so much celebration and it was turning Maximus sick. 

_Calm down,_ **_calm down!_ ** _They’ll hear you._

_Stay._

_Don’t run._

_Don’t run!_

Distantly, he heard them leave, the door creaked and then nothing. His vents shuddered. Fortress Maximus’s hands shook against his mouth. He pulled them back and wheezed. Breathing in heat, the stench of boiled energon and the dirt of Garrus-9. 

_Drip,_

_Drip_

_Drip._

It was quiet. Just his systems gurgling and stalling. The pulse of his fuel thudding in his audios built up pressure behind his optics. The bury haze grew and he was too distraught to blink it away until … he thought he saw the corpse in front of him flinch. 

_No._

Not flinch. It moved and then moved again. 

Fortress Maximus became a statue on the floor. 

_Screeeeeeeech_

Broken metal dragged against the ground. Dead eyes stared at Max as the body was pulled back slowly. A trail of energon spread behind it. 

The corpse was pulled until Fortress Maximus couldn’t see it anymore and then there was a crash…and a crunch. 

He didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to think of what might be happening. The ongoing ripping and breaking sounds making his imagination too vivid. 

_Don’t make a sound._

_Don’t move an inch._

_Drip,_

_Drip_

_Thud._

Footsteps. 

They got closer 

...and closer. 

Fortress Maximus wrapped his hands over his face, covering his eyes and mouth.

_Don’t see me._

_Don’t._

The thudding got loud. So loud. Then stopped. 

Fortress Maximus body rattled on the floor, surrounded by silence that ate his courage. 

It felt like ages, but Fortress Maximus still wished he’d waited for longer and maybe then the spectre wouldn’t be hanging over him still. The darkness and the silence, the hell his own mind created still wasn’t as bad as what waited for him when he finally unpeeled his fingers from his face. 

In front of him, smiling, with his face painted in someone else’s energon, optics shining with gleeful sin. Overlord. 

“Hello, Maxie.” And he reached forward.


End file.
